


Run (If You Want)

by sequence_fairy



Series: She Sells Sanctuary [4]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Soulmates AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 14:43:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9825026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: Soulmarks are neither common nor well-understood.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goingtothetardis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingtothetardis/gifts).



> Written for the [ Doctor Who Secret Santa ](http://dwsecretsanta.tumblr.com).

Rose wakes up in a cold sweat; heart thundering against her ribs. She rolls over, curling around her pillow, willing her breathing to return to level. She inhales, deeply and deliberately, counting to seven before letting the breath out in an even stream. The purposeful act of breathing helps ground her into herself and seal off the panic that had coloured the remnants of the nightmare in sharp red and ice blue. **  
**

Once she gets her breathing under control, Rose rolls onto her back, to stare up at the stuccoed ceiling of her bedroom. The nightmares have not gotten any better, no matter assurances the doctors at Torchwood have given her and her mother. If anything, Rose thinks, the mandated therapy sessions make them worse. She sighs, and gives up on sleep for the rest of the night, knowing that if she closes her eyes now, all she’ll be able to conjure are leftovers from the terror.

The sun is starting to light the horizon as Rose fills the kettle to put it on the boil for tea. While she waits for the kettle, she leans against the counter, tracing the pattern of snowflakes on her mug with one finger. Like most of her mugs, it came from the second hand shop two blocks down from her favourite coffee shop and is mismatched with everything else. There’s not much in this slow path life that gives her the thrill of stepping into the unknown holding the Doctor’s hand, but that little thrift store sometimes manages to recapture a fraction of the feeling when Rose’s questing hands find something especially delightful.

The shrill whistle of the kettle interrupts Rose’s reminiscence and she makes herself a cup of tea, holding the steaming mug in both hands as she watches the sun come up over this alternate London. The sky here still turns the dusky pink and gold Rose remembers from her home London, but because of tighter controls on air pollution, the colour lasts only a moment as the sun swells over the horizon and lifts into the sky.

Rose lifts her mug and her sleeve falls back, the silvery mark on her wrist becoming exposed. It’s a curious soulmark - circles within circles, shot through with alien symbols -  and when Rose had been small, it had been the source of much taunting from her peers. She never quite got over the feeling of wanting to hide it, even after discovering what, exactly, it was.

The tea is hot and sweet and herbal - Rose doesn’t start her day with caffeine, not in this universe - and the steam bathes her face as she brings her mug to her lips. Rose remembers when the Doctor had seen her mark for the first time. She remembers his face - the way his skin had paled and his eyes had widened when she’d reached out to grasp the lever he was showing her.

She’d stilled, and turned her head, following his gaze down to her arm. The pattern of concentric circles laid bare on her forearm had made her breath hitch. She’d flicked her eyes back to his, an apology ready on her tongue, but the naked yearning in his face had made her mouth go dry.

He’d reached out, tentative, and traced a finger along the pattern, before seeming to shake out of his stupor. Before Rose could say anything, the Doctor had snatched his hand back, and began prattling about where they were headed and Rose had let the matter lie.

It was months and a regeneration later before he’d acknowledged the mark again, and this time, he’d had her pinned to the wall, his body heavy-hot against hers and his voice dark and low in her ear; “do you know what it means, Rose?” He’d asked, and she’d shaken her head, arching her back to press more fully against him. She’d had no idea what he was talking about.

The Doctor’s breath was hot against her ear. “It says ‘run’.”

The jingling ring of Rose’s phone alarm startles her out of her reverie and back into the present. She sets the mug down on the counter, ignoring the pang of longing that settled low in her stomach. She misses him, like a phantom limb. He’s gone though, trapped on the other side of an invisible and impenetrable wall.

–

It’s months later before she thinks of her mark again. In the interim, there’ve been many late nights at the lab, many failed experiments and several nearly fatal accidents, but they’ve finally got the cannon up and running and Rose is, once again, awoken before dawn.

This time, it’s not a nightmare that wakes her - though she’s had her fair share of those - it’s the sound of his voice ringing through the back of her mind, and she is immediately on alert. It’s plaintive, this cry across the void, and Rose can feel herself turning towards it, physically as well as mentally.

The voice fades as she grows more wakeful, until it disappears entirely and Rose’s soulmark _burns_.

—

The first time Rose uses the cannon, it spits her out on a peninsula of sand on a desolate beach. It’s cold and miserable and the wind stings where it hits her face and steals the breath out of her lungs.

The timer on the cannon starts, and Rose looks around for shelter from the onslaught. She’ll be here for at least an hour while the thing recharges. There’s an outcropping of rock not too far off, so Rose makes for it, hoping that it’ll at least shield her from some of the wind. It does a poor job and Rose huddles further into her coat, stuffing her hands into the pockets, thinking miserably about the woolly mittens that are buried in the back of her closet, because back there it is August and sweltering.

The wind continues to whistle past her ears, and Rose hunches deeper into her coat, willing the thin material to be warmer. Time passes agonizingly slowly, and she grows colder and colder under the gale. Soon, her teeth are chattering even though she’s clenching them and she can’t feel her toes in the ends of her boots.

At first, she thinks she’s hearing things, but when the same whisper slithers under the wind for a second time, she stands straight. It’s her name. It’s his voice.

“Doctor?” Rose asks the wind, and it answers with a buffeting guest and her name; a desperate cry that chills Rose more than any wind could. The skin tingles on her wrist and Rose looks down. Her soulmark is _glowing_ \- ice blue luminescence spreads around the concentric circles, lighting them like a path of fluorescing water across her skin. Her breath catches, but before she can make sense of it, she is blinded - pain arcs across her temples like lightning, and sizzles through every nerve.

The last thing she hears is his voice, calling, calling, _calling_.

—

Rose wakes up alone.

She blinks, and looks down at her wrist, expecting to see the unearthly blue glow once more. Instead, it has faded back to it’s usual silver and she turns her wrist first one way, then the other, to see if she can find any traces of the blue. It has completely disappeared. She drops her head back to the pillows.

Before she can slip back into sleep, the door to her room is flung open and her mother bustles in. Rose has no time to prepare before she is gathered up bodily and hugged to within perhaps an inch of her life. Rose pats her mother weakly on the back.

Jackie lets her go after a moment, and Rose sinks gratefully back onto her bed. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Jackie scolds, and Rose reads the scold and finds the fear it came from and doesn’t have the heart to do anything but smile at her mother and reach for one of her hands. Jackie grips her fingers so tightly Rose has to force back a wince. “I thought we’d lost you,” Jackie says, and the ghost of terror colours of her words.

“I’m okay mum,” Rose says, sneaking a look up at the doctor hovering on the outskirts of the scene. He nods reassuringly. He’s Torchwood, so Rose knows she’ll get the full rundown later, but for now, she can tell her mum that she’s okay, and decide later how much further she wants to take that lie.

Jackie sniffs before squeezing Rose’s hand and releasing it. The doctor takes his cue and hustles everyone out, leaving him alone with Rose.

“The emergency pingback pulled you back across,” the doctor says before Rose can even open her mouth. “We think you were electrocuted, but we could find no evidence of a puncture wound or any trace of entry point at all. Can you tell me what happened Rose?”

Rose looks down at the mark on her arm. “I think it was something to do with my soulmark, and the Doctor! I could hear him calling me, and then it started to glow blue. After that, it’s just pain - like someone fried my nerves?” There’s still a phantom ache in her temples.

The doctor makes notes on his pad, his pen scratching across the page pensively. He looks up and peers at Rose over the top of thin-framed glasses. Rose knows that look. They still aren’t one hundred percent certain she’s been telling the truth about the lines on her arm, because no one from this dimension has one, and well, very few people from hers do either.

Rose lets the doctor’s voice wash over her as he talks about her medication regimen and how they’re keeping her overnight for observation. She is thinking, instead, about the electric blue that coursed across her skin, and about the flash of awareness before her head split apart. Rose looks down at her wrist again, tracing the silver lines with her eyes, and the doctor leaves her then, patting her on the shoulder as he goes.

—

She finds him, finally, on a dirty street in Chiswick, and nearly loses him again within the first five minutes. The sizzle of a Dalek laser steals all the breath from her lungs and her soulmark flares; sweet, hot pain rockets up her arm. Rose’s heart thunders in her ears as the Doctor’s skeleton is illuminated from within, as he jerks and stutters and falls, and then she’s moving. She’s never moved so fast in her life.

Rose lands hard on her knees when she reaches him, and she clutches at him as he gasps, and his skin pales. Her mind is a never-ending repetition of no-no-no-no, over and over, until he chokes weakly and says her name. She smiles, and her cheeks hurt, and he smiles and tells her ‘hello’ and then it’s a blur of Jack and Mickey and golden light and the Dalek emperor and being left on a beach with a copy of the man she’d been looking for her whole life.

As the TARDIS disappears, Rose expects her soulmark to go with it, or to hurt, or to do _something_ other than lie there, inert, on her wrist. The man beside her - this stranger wearing her Doctor’s face - takes her hand in his, and they both gasp at the jolt. Rose turns their hands over, and watches, fascinated, as lines bleed from her skin to his and turn in circles and symbols in the space on his forearm.

After his mark settles,they both flare briefly blue and then quiesce back into silver lines. Rose looks up to find him looking back at her.  She thinks about the reckless kiss, about the shiver of his body beneath her hands, about how she’d been punched breathless by the whisper of his voice at her ear. “Doctor,” she says.

The man in question smiles softly, looks down at his arm and back up to her eyes. “If you want,” the Doctor says, in answer to her unasked question. “It says ‘if you want’.”


End file.
